I think about this sometimes because of the enormous impact that J.K. Rowling has had on a generation of readers. I think in some cases popular culture leads to change and in others, popular culture follows change. Sometimes it's just candy.

The major issues in this book (guns, the role of the elderly in society,) are things about which society has already undergone changes over in the past. With the right exposure, this book could have an impact on insighting yet another shift. I think media (books, movies, music, etc.) have the ability to make change, but it's all about timing and widespread exposure. There also has to be a willingness for a shift. "People only change if they want to change."

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I think a good example of what this book has done would be the conversations it has started. even just on onlinebookclub, it has got people discussing the issue of gun control and putting it out there. It's important for things like this to be discussed rather than swept under the carpet and avoided.

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon

While I doubt that this novel itself will gain much traction with the general public at large, I do believe that creative media is an important indicator of a sea change in the views of the majority. Looking back on this moment in history, it will be clear to the next generation that our opinions collected themselves within our art. To those watching currently, creative media serves as encouragement to stand up for what they believe in. I know pieces centered around gun control certainly have that effect on me.

Books like this have a tendency to do one of two things, make a wide impact and become widely talked about and you hear about it for ages down the road. School teachers use them as required reading and have discussions about them. Books like "The Giver" and "Hunger Games" etc. Others that could have made an even bigger impact seem to go unnoticed.

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.
–Author Unknown

I think people are more reactive to visuals and other stimuli that are shocking or memorable. I think telling stories through creative media is definitely something that can ignite conversation, but unfortunately these days I think books may reach smaller audiences than movies :/

I think the humanities in general play a huge role in cultural change. Plato, Niztche, and Cervantes all heavely influenced and changed society. Literature specifically is being proven to inspire compasion and empathy in what is being called, The Don Quijote Effect. There is a disdain for the arts and humanities among certain groups of people, but what they forget is that we live in a world of humans whose minds think in metaphors. Story is important and can change people.

In my opinion media shapes the minds of it's consumers in a very significant way. People follow trends because they are being massively advertised to them. The same goes for political opinions and such. And the absence of certain things plays a great role here as well. For example, not spreading word about tragedies caused by the lack of gun control can not prevent them from happening again. The lack of such news makes people believe that it doesn't happen often and when they do reach them, people dismiss them because they believe they are a rarity. I think that television, newspapers and movies play a bigger role in all these things than books because book generally don't reach out to so many people at once like these other mediums do.

I think in our society the ability to make people care about issues is underrated by consumers, but understood by every other entity. There's value in books like this that get people thinking about issues because you know there are corporations and orgs silently working away at making us hold certain opinions. Creative works have always been great at stirring things up, and it's rarely a negative thing socially, in the long run.

I had a professor in college who swore that if media of any kind, especially broadcast media like billboards, radio commercials, TV shows, et cetera, would simply depict racial, gender, and orientational diversity more regularly, then these things would become more readily accepted in society very quickly. When you think back to the Cheerios commercial that showed a mixed-race couple with a child, all just eating cereal, and the insane backlash from lots of people who "didn't like it," it's strange to consider how normal those kinds of commercials and things are now, just a couple years later, and with very few dissenting voices piping up about it loudly enough to be heard very well. And think of the newly accepted use of gendered pronouns in written media. It has become so common to see "she" used instead of only "he" when a person or group of unspecified gender is referred to that I no longer even notice it. Before, though, it felt awkward to read something and suddenly see "she" instead of "he." Turns out all we needed to do was let go of something that never made sense in the first place, and then doing so suddenly lost its stigma.

I agree that creative media can have a huge impact. However, I think that most people who need to read the book will not. If the book was adapted into a movie, it may be able to reach a larger audience as the time commitment is smaller than that of a book.

The concept of the watch would make a great episode of Black Mirror. For those of you who haven't seen it, every episode is a short story about a type of futuristic technology. It follows characters who use it, and typically shows the pitfalls of that technology. It's very much a warning about being too dependent on technology. The rest of the issues presented in Final Notice are almost all hot topics right now anyway: gun control, responsibility of the NRA, and immigration.